Badge printing, measured

A badge printer has a rated speed and an actual speed. The gap between them is where queues come from.

Rated speed assumes a print job already formatted and waiting. Actual speed includes the scan, the lookup, the confirmation, and the hand-off. In practice a single station sustains roughly one hundred and twenty badges an hour with a trained operator, and rather less in the first thirty minutes while everyone is finding their rhythm.

The implication is arithmetic. A conference expecting four hundred people in the first hour needs either four stations or a pre-printed list. Choosing on the morning is choosing the queue.